Walther Fritz Meissner (16.12.1882 —16.02.1974) was a German physicist and a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. In 1946 — 50 he was its president. He was born in Königsberg. He studied at the Berlin Technological Institute and the Technical University in Berlin. In 1907 he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. He worked at the National Bureau of Standards (Berlin). He founded a cryogenic laboratory in Berlin, where he carried out research in 1923 — 33. From 1934 he was professor at the Technical University in Munich. He was also director of the Low Temperature Laboratory of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
His work concerned mainly low-temperature physics. He discovered many superconducting alloys and compounds. In 1932, with R. Holm, he established experimentally that the contact resistance between two metals disappears when they become superconductors (the first observation of Josephson tunnelling). In 1933, with R. Ochsenfeld, he detected the expulsion of a magnetic field by a superconductor (the Meissner effect).
The C. von Linde Medal and the F. Simon Prize.